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Letter from GEORGE PERKINS MARSH to CHARLES ELIOT NORTON, dated
October 17, 1863.,
Original located at the University of Vermont's Special Collections in the George
Perkins Marsh Collection, filed by date.,
http://cdi.uvm.edu/collections/item/gpmcen631017 (accessed March 31, 2015)

Letter from GEORGE PERKINS MARSH to CHARLES ELIOT NORTON, dated
October 17, 1863.

Transcribed by
:

TEI mark-up by
:
James P. Tranowski andEllen Thomson

Published by: University of Vermont. All rights reserved.

Publication Information

Turin
October 17 1863

My dear Sir

You would be quite justified in holding me guilty of inexcusable neglect in not
sooner replying to your very acceptable letter of May last, and in so long delaying
to execute your commission with respect to the Ms of Benvenuto da
Imola, but the loss of time is not wholly owing to inattention on my part.
There are but two or three Dantophiles in Turin, so far as I know. One of these only
knows that Ld Vernon's intended edition was never
published and that Nannucci is dead. The other I have not
been able to see in consequence of his and my own occasional absences from town. I
had expected to go to Milan in August, but an indisposition on the part of Mrs Marsh
prevented the intended journey. I now design visiting both -------------------------------- Page -------------------------------- that city and Florence in
November & will make your request my first business in both. There is a
paleographer of reputation among the attachés of the Ambrosian at
Milan, but I observe one or two palpable misreadings in a Spanish tract
edited by him, and hope he will prove more accurate in Italian. In any case, I will
spare no pains to secure you an exact transcript.

I had become a good deal encouraged by our recent successes in the field, but Rosecranz's sad defeat disheartens me. As to Meade, I have never seen any reason to believe him capable of much, and
as he is said to belong to the class of 'no-party men,' I strongly suspect
he will turn out another McClellan. In any event, Halleck will take care that he shall win no signal victory. We
are losing the confidence and sympathy of our best friends -------------------------------- Page -------------------------------- in Europe, because irresolution,
timidity and tergiversation of our government, its indulgent treatment of the
rebellion, its stopping enlistments last year, and its failure to enforce the
conscription at an early period in this, have given rise to grave doubts as to its
honesty of purpose and especially as to its sincerity in respect to the slave
question. The mission of that rank pro-slavery advocate Bishop
Hughes did our cause great mischief in Europe. His hostility to liberty of
all sorts--except the liberty of domination in his own church--was well known, and
it was no secret, that, though professedly a Union man, the Union he preferred was a
union under a pro- slavery government. That such a man should have been sent abroad
as in any sense a representative of this administration, was thought an inexplicable
mystery, and his late atrocious harangue to "the men called
rioters" -------------------------------- Page -------------------------------- which--obvious as its purpose was--has, so far as I
know, met with no rebuke from the administration or its friends, has revived the
feeling which his European mission excited. We must strike in earnest this winter,
or we shall have a moral, if not a material, crusade of the whole world against us.

The conduct of the government, clergy, nobility, and press of England has surprised
me in nothing except the boldness of the mendacity of all of them. Their malignity
was not in the least degree unexpected to me. The success of the Puseyite movement revealed to me, more than twenty years ago, such a
degree of intellectual decrepitude and of moral degeneration in the governing
classes and in the church of England, that no iniquity or folly on their part has
since seemed incredible to me.

You are doing an admirable work with your political tracts, and I am glad to see that
you have not neglected those renegades -------------------------------- Page --------------------------------Carlyle and Ruskin.
One point I desire to see conspicuously brought out with reference to those
gentlemen's present views of the analogy between the condition of the slave and of
the European hired labourer. I refer to the Southern doctrine of the nature of the
master's rights over the slave. The highest courts in both Carolina and Alabama, you
know, have decided that the power of the master over the slave, unless limited by
local statute, is as absolute as that of the owner over his ox. He may butcher him,
and sell his skin to the tanner, his bones to the turner, his teeth to the dentist,
and no indictment will lie for cruelty to the slave, or even for his murder, except
where the legislature of the state limits his rights by enactments which a
subsequent legislature may repeal. Could you send me some paper or pamphlet
containing these decisions?

Not much is doing in a literary or scientific way at Turin. -------------------------------- Page -------------------------------- You know the New Dictionary of Tommaseo, which has now published 22 or 23
dispense covering some pp. into B. It is laboured, immensely so, and
valuable, but philologically speaking, behind the times. The excerpts are all
modernized in orthography, and there is no etymology. Fanfani at Florence has lately published a Vocabulary of Tuscanisms--2 vol.
12 mo which is convenient. He is now issuing a periodical--Il
Borghini--devoted to the Tuscan speech. Two or three series of
publications of old Mss & reprints of scarce tracts are going on, and I hope
the newly awakened national Italian feeling will give us at last a history of the
Italian language, or rather, what is better still, a collection of materials for the
history of that tongue.

I occupied many months preceding August with writing out & preparing for the
press -------------------------------- Page -------------------------------- notes & observations I have been for years making on Physical Geography as affected by human action. I do this to
get out of my brain phantoms which have long been spooking in it, and have no notion
of prosecuting such subjects far. The book must be now nearly ready for publication
by Scribner of N.Y. It makes no scientific pretensions and will have no value for
scientific men who will, of course, condemn it as trash, which very likely it is,
but it may interest some people who are willing to look upon nature with unlearned
eyes.

Mrs Marsh joins me in kind regards to your mother & sisters as well as to Mrs
Norton and yourself. Yours very truly,

P.S. I
should have dated my letter at Nimes. We were driven out of Turin by repairs
now making on our house and came over the Col de Genèvre and Lantaret to
spend a few days in the heart of France. Nimes and most of the Rhone valley
we knew before, but we have now seen for the first time Aigues Mortes, a jewel of the first water, which, like Nuremberg,
ought to be kept under glass for the benefit of those who love to peek into
the life of the Middle Ages.